Julia Frayer is Managing Director and Partner at London Economics International LLC (“LEI”), a boutique economic consulting firm focused on the energy sector and network-based infrastructure industries. Over the last 27 years with LEI, Julia has worked across the US, Canada, Asia, Europe, and South America, serving a diverse client roster, ranging from investor-owned utilities, independent power producers, power marketing firms, competitive retailers, clean tech start-ups, private-equity backed portfolio companies, environmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, independent system operators, regulators and policymakers. As an applied economist, Julia focuses her time on economic analysis of policies and rate reforms, evaluation of infrastructure assets, such as power plants, natural gas-related infrastructure, electricity transmission and distribution systems, and utilities, as well as advisory on market design and regulation. Julia is frequently asked to testify before regulatory agencies, civil and bankruptcy courts, and international arbitration panels on topics such as information policies, market design, tariffs, competition, and contractual interpretation.
In Alberta, as with other structured electricity markets across North America and Europe, Julia has been an advisory presence since the advent of electricity sector deregulation. She has provided market analysis and electricity market design services, covering a range of products and topics – energy, capacity, and ancillary services. Julia has also advised on design of competitive marketplaces for a variety of electricity-adjacent products and services, including competitive procurement of new generation, auctions for renewable electricity certificates and carbon offsets, design and management of open seasons for transmission capacity, and competitive solicitations for various retail products such as standard service, default supply, and full requirements service. Over the tenure of her career, staring with the restructuring and privatization activities in the 1990s, she has managed the preparation of independent market analyses reports that supported the development and/or financing of over $1 billion of assets, including use of traditional bank debt, project financing, government backed guarantees and instruments, and novel private equity-backed structures. She has also performed system planning studies and resource adequacy analyses, and advised on competition issues before Federal regulators in the U.S. and Canada in relation to prominent mergers and acquisitions. Her work is grounded in the economic theory, and she frequently uses quantitative techniques and data analysis in her work, including deployment of simulation modeling tools, neural network models, capacity optimization tools, econometric analysis, computable general equilibrium models, total factor productivity analysis, and benchmarking.